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Book Review By Jeanette Purkis
Finding a Different Kind of Normal by Jeanette Purkis

Jeanette Purkis is born in England in 1974. She moves to Australia in the 1980s and has continuing struggles fitting in with her peers at school. As a teenager, Jeanette joins the Socialist Party and spends her time away from home, attending protests and other socialist-type things. Through the Socialist movement, Jeanette meets a criminal and ends up in prison after committing an armed robbery. In prison Jeanette learns that she has something called Asperger Syndrome - a condition related to autism - that has caused many of her difficulties in relating to people and understanding human behaviour. Jeanette refuses to accept her diagnosis and drifts through several years of criminal activity and drug use. She hits rock bottom and decides to turn her life around, enrolling in therapy courses, then art school, on her release from a subsequent prison sentence in 2000. Jeanette accepts her diagnosis and completes her Honours degree in fine art, then writes the book.


Plot & Themes
Phys disability/mental struggle? Yes
Struggle with - mental illness
Which institution - prison
Life in an institution Yes
Period of greatest activity? - 1950+

Subject of Biography
Gender - Female
Profession/status:
Ethnicity - White
Nationality - British

Setting
How much descriptions of surroundings? - 3 ()
City? Yes
Misc setting - prison
Century: - 1980's-Present

Writing Style
Book makes you feel? - encouraged - like laughing
Graphic sex in book? Yes
What kind of sex: - rape/molest - lesbians!
How much dialogue in bio? - significantly more descript than dialog
How much of bio focuses on most famous period of life? - 0-25% of book
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